


Have One, Have Twenty More

by semperama



Series: Tumblr Ficlets - Band of Brothers [6]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Addiction, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Drug Abuse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-19 19:46:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11320392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semperama/pseuds/semperama
Summary: Lew tries to keep it a secret, but Dick was going to find out sooner or later.





	Have One, Have Twenty More

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a song prompt "The Good Times are Killing Me" by Modest Mouse.

She passes him the pill under the table when she notices he's starting to droop. Her eyes are laughing at him, challenging him, so he pops it in his mouth without asking, and as he’s washing it down with a swallow of whiskey, she leans in and says, “That’ll pep you up. Now let’s dance.”

It does pep him up, better than an ice cold shower. Even after he knocks back another scotch, he’s buzzing with energy, and he feels damn good. He takes the girl home and they feel each other up parked out front of her building, and Lew is more virile than he’s been in years, since he was a teenager, since before he started every day with whiskey-laced coffee and was usually pretty well shellacked by noon. He gets back home and walks in the front door whistling a tune through his teeth, and Dick looks up from his book and narrows his eyes.

“Good night?” he asks.

“Best I’ve had in a while,” Lew tells him. Then he takes up whistling again and mounts the steps and heads for the bathroom to shower off the smoke and sex. He gets no more than two hours of sleep that night, but he wakes up the next morning full of energy.

Once he gets himself a couple bottles of those magic pills, he hides them in the liquor cabinet behind the dark bottles where Dick will never look. At first, one dose keeps him going for 48 hours at a stretch. He can drink without getting sleepy, he feels like he’s waltzing on a cloud, and even the sleepless nights don’t bother him; at least he’s not having dreams of Bastogne, exploding trees and Dick with a red nose and a hacking cough he may never be rid of.

“You’ve been chipper lately,” Dick says over dinner one night. His expression shows no small amount of skepticism, and the shame it dredges up in Lew manifests as annoyance. Lew furrows his brow and looks down at his plate and pushes his food around. He hasn’t had much of appetite lately; he’s been cinching his belt a little tighter.

“Can’t explain it,” he lies. “Maybe it’s the weather.”

“Have you seen that girl again? The one you went out with the other night?”

Lew hasn’t, but he considers lying again just to get Dick off his case. Considers it, then decides against it. “No, I haven’t. Don’t think I will be in the future, either.”

“Hmm,” Dick says. He probably has a theory, and he’ll probably let Lew know what it is sooner or later, but for now he returns to his dinner and silence, the same companionable silence they share every night, and Lew manages to choke down a few more bites of his green beans for lack of anything better to do.

They go into the city one night and meet up with Harry and Kitty and Blanche and a couple of Blanche’s friends. It isn’t a rough-running crowd, so Lew should rein himself in, but he’s had his drink refilled three times before he even notices what he’s doing, and both Dick and Blanche are taking turns shooting him concerned looks, as if this isn’t the norm for him. He excuses himself to the bathroom and is relieved to find it empty, and there he pops one of the bennies into his mouth and dry-swallows it. He’s been carrying a couple extras in his pockets just in case he ever needs them, in case he ran into a night like tonight. When he gets back to the table, he’s feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and a hundred stories are on the tip of his tongue, some from the war and some from before that, and all of them interesting enough to have them all eating out of the palm of his hand, laughing at his jokes. If Dick keeps looking at him funny, he doesn’t notice.

That night, he doesn’t get any sleep at all.

He starts taking a pill every morning after that, and sometimes, if he starts to crash in the evenings, he’ll take one then too. Anything to stave off the melancholia that comes when the medicine wears off. Because that’s what it is—medicine—meant to keep his spirits up when nothing else will, meant to keep the nightmares away and make him an easier person to be around, so Dick won’t pack his bags and head back to Pennsylvania.

Dick still narrows his eyes at Lew when he catches him refilling his glass one too many times in a day, but what he doesn’t know is that Lew is drinking twice as much as he sees, nipping from a flask at work and drinking long into the night, after he’s gone to bed. He doesn’t know about the pills either. He doesn’t—until he does.

They are headed out one night to a party at Lew’s parents’ house, a work function that promises to be excruciating and interminable. Dick insists on driving, probably because Lew has a good buzz on already, but as they’re heading out the door, Lew pats his pockets and realizes he doesn’t have his emergency stash of bennies on him. “Go ahead,” he says. “I’ll be right there. I forgot something.” And he watches Dick walk out the door before he turns back toward the living room and goes to the liquor cabinet, pushes bottles out of the way to find the pills.

He’s shaking three of them into his hand when he hears a step in the foyer and looks up to see Dick standing there.

“Lewis?” he says, low and confused like he isn’t sure who he’s looking at. Like he doesn’t recognize the person kneeling on the floor with a pill bottle in his hand at all.

“Dick,” Lew says, “I said I’d be right there.” As if that’s what this is about: Lew taking too long.

Dick’s face is coloring like he has something to be embarrassed about, and his fingers are ticking restlessly at his sides. They stay like that, staring at each other, for what seems like forever. Lew’s heart is racing. His hands have started to shake.

“It’s not what you think,” he says at last.

Then, Dick does something terrifying: he laughs. It’s a dry, brittle sound, like wind through naked trees. “Yeah? How would you know what I think?”

“It’s…it helps—”

“Stop.” Dick crosses the room in a blink and kneels next to Lew. He reaches out and brushes the pills out of Lew’s hand, and they go bouncing across the carpet, one coming to stop against Dick’s shoe and the other two rolling under the cabinet and out of sight. Lew is stunned enough that he drops the bottle too, but it lands right-side up between them, its contents intact.

“Dick. I.” He should have thought about what he would say. He should have had a clever lie prepared; even Dick can be charmed by a good lie. But he has nothing. He’s empty. “I need…”

Dick has taken both Lew’s hands in his, and at first Lew thinks it’s just to keep him from reaching for the pills, but then Dick draws Lew’s hands to his chest and holds them there, his grip a shade too tight, his fingernails biting into Lew’s skin. “What do you need?”

 _Help_ , Lew thinks. _I need help_. He can’t say it though, won’t say it, so he just stares at Dick wide-eyed and prays he hasn’t fucked this up once and for all. Lew can feel Dick’s heart beating against the backs of his knuckles, strong and steady and so unlike his own rabbit-quick pulse. Too quick, he thinks. Is a human heart supposed to beat this fast?

“Okay,” Dick says, as if Lew has given him and answer. And maybe he has. Maybe not pulling away, letting Dick hold onto him like this, is answer enough. “Okay,” he says again. “We can figure this out.”

If Dick says that they can, then they can. Lew may not believe in much, but he believes in that.


End file.
